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Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 98: Mar-Apr 1995 |
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Arp banished, but not redshift anomalies
Several years ago, H. Arp, a noted American astronomer, moved to Europe to continue his research because, in part, of the hostility of American astronomers to his discoveries. The problem was (and still is) that Arp found galaxies that seem to be physically interacting and, therefore, at the same distance from earth, but yet have radically different or "discordant" redshifts. Since redshifts are supposed to be a measure of distance from the earth, an anomaly comes into focus. This anomaly; that is, the credibility of the redshift distance scale, challenges the ideas of an expanding universe and the Big Bang itself.
Freed from the shackles of American scientific correctness, Arp continues to find embarrassing facts about the cosmos. For example, take galaxies NGC 450 and UGC 807, with redshifts of 1863 and 11600 km/s respectively:
"Six lines of evidence are presented showing that the two discordant redshift galaxies are interacting. One would have to invoke an enormous conspiracy of galaxies to avoid this conclusion. Yet, if accepted, this case alone brings into question the interpretation of cosmological red-shift for all galaxies."
(Moles, M., et al, including Arp; "Testing for Interaction between the Galaxies NGC 450 and UGC 807," Astrophysical Journal, 432:135, 1994.)
But discordant redshifts are not limited to distant galaxies.
"In the Milky Way, the so-called "K-effect" shows that hot, young stars seem to be exploding away from us in every direction (i.e., they have an excess redshift right here in our own galaxy). If this had been heeded when first discovered, the expansion of the universe might never have been promulgated."
(Arp, H.; "Companion Galaxies: A Test of the Assumption that Velocities Can Be Inferred from Redshifts," Astrophysical Journal, 430:74, 1994.)
Both of the above quotations are from abstracts written by T. Van Flandern in his Meta Research Bulletin, 3:51 and 3:40, 1994, respectively.
More on discordant redshifts can be found in our catalog: Stars, Galaxies, Cosmos. It is described here.